Hosted IVR services offer a lot of advantages for businesses – not the least of which is the fact they are fast and easy to deploy and require no up-front investment in hardware, software, upgrades or IT department resources.

Typically, today’s hosted IVR solutions -- such as those offered by industry leader Angel.com -- can be deployed in a matter of days, as opposed to weeks, and they offer a broad range of advanced features and functionality to meet just about any type of business model.

But as many companies have already learned, every IVR is a “work-in-progress,” in that IVR functionality needs to be constantly fine tuned and “tweaked” based on basic operations; customer satisfaction with the system; changes within the company business model; changes within the marketplace and a wide variety of other factors.

For example, suppose you’re an e-commerce business and you just added a new product line and you want your customers to be able to access information about those new products through your IVR system. Maybe you have a whole new sales division associated with the new product line and you need to be able to accurately steer calls from interested customers to “product experts” who can answer their questions. Or perhaps one of your competitors just launched a new campaign and you want to counter it quickly by adding a section to your incoming message informing customers that you’re offering a similar deal.

For these and other business reasons, you’re going to want an IVR system that allows you to make adjustments “on-the-fly,” so your customers understand what’s going on and you can react quickly to abrupt changes in the marketplace.

Angel.com’s innovative Site Builder toolkit is a Web-based “point-and-click” application that makes it easy for any user to design, deploy and manage a customized IVR system. This powerful, yet simple-to-use Web-based tool kit, which comes free with the hosted IVR service, enables companies to build their own fully-customized speech-enabled- self-serve systems from scratch and then manage them afterward. This gives companies the ability to differentiate themselves by creating their own unique caller experiences.

Best of all, you won’t have to rely on your (limited) IT staff to continuously monitor and tweak the system – nor will you have to go running back to a vendor every time you need a message or complex branching scheme modified. With very little training, just about anyone in your organization can learn how to make fine adjustments or even major configuration changes to the system with confidence. And by eliminating the need for voice XML code-writing experience or IT support, you can focus on more strategic and higher value activities.

The Site Builder toolkit significantly reduces the time, expense, and complexity associated with implementing and maintaining traditional voice applications. Using intuitive menu options, you can select a number of “voice pages” to build and direct your call flow. Each page represents a new action in call flow- and none require any coding or technical experience. In addition, Angel.com provides a number of feature-rich options to enhance your call design- from call recording to enabling outbound calling.

With Site Builder, you can measure your efforts to improve the caller experience. Define the variables you’d like to track and run real-time reports that help you maximize your application and drive caller satisfaction.

To learn more about Angel.com’s Site Builder, click here.

Angel.com recently introduced its SugarCRM connector, which is used to voice-enable SugarCRM (News - Alert) applications for users. As such this new offering from SugarCRM and Angel.com makes it possible to access, collect and update customer information on the phone using one's voice – even from mobile devices!

Patrick Barnard is a contributing writer for TMCnet. To read more of Patrick’s articles, please visit his columnist page.